Snow, Dog, Foot

Description

Adelmo Farandola doesn’t like people. In summer he roams the valleys, his only company a talkative, cantankerous old dog and a young mountain ranger who, Adelmo Farandola suspects, is spying on him.

When winter comes, man and dog are snowed in. With stocks of wine and bread depleted, they pass the time squabbling over scraps, debating who will eat the other first.

Spring brings a more sinister discovery that threatens to break Adelmo Farandola’s already faltering grip on reality: a man’s foot poking out of the receding snow.

Why Peirene chose to publish this book:

This strange little book stayed with me. Images slipped from the pages and lodged themselves in my mind: the beautiful but hostile mountain, the isolated cabin, the grumpy old man who refuses to be helped and the stray dog in need of a friend. It is a book full of humour, grit and empathy that made me laugh and cry in equal measure.

Author

Neve, cane, piede, first published in 2015 is Claudio Morandini’s sixth book. The novel is a literary phenomenon; a top-five Italian bestseller, it won the Procida-Elsa Morante-Isola di Arturo prize in 2016 and has been translated into French, Spanish and Turkish. It appears here for the first time in English.

Translator

J Ockenden is a translator, journalist, broadcaster, poet and winner of the 2019 Peirene Stevns Translation Prize. After entering the prize with a translation of the first chapter, J was awarded a writer’s retreat in the Pyrenees, where the work was completed. This is J’s first full-length literary translation.

Press

“The book frequently plays with our expectations and throws us off balance … Morandini takes us through a range of emotions, often amusing us and unsettling us on the same page.” Malcolm Forbes, The Herald

“Wonderful, funny, moving and unforgettable.” Charlie Connelly, The New European

‘A remarkable depiction of an old man’s descent from self-reliance into madness.’ Amanda Craig, Author

‘Morandini leads us into the labyrinths of his protagonist’s mind.’ Demetrio Paolin, Il Foglio

‘Claudio Morandini writes of the icy extravagant oblivion where things lose their contours and memories become indistinguishable from the imagination.’ Georgia Vasta, Il Venerdi di Repubblica